Thijs Janzen
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thijsjanzen.bsky.social
Thijs Janzen
@thijsjanzen.bsky.social
130 followers 270 following 13 posts
Scientific Programmer @ TRES, University of Groningen, Netherlands
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Reposted by Thijs Janzen
dlimnothrissa.bsky.social
Part 1 version 1 of my Malawi cichlid ID guide is out now. 2 more parts for follow, with my intention being to revise, expand and improve each over time. This one is essentially a companion to our whole genome sequence paper in Science (Blumer et al. 2025). ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...
Identification of the Cichlid Fishes of Lake Malawi/Nyasa Part 1: Cyrtocarina (the ‘benthic’ or ‘hap’ sub-radiation).
ecoevorxiv.org
November 26, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
hannahdugdale.bsky.social
Congratulations to Dr @euantheyoung.bsky.social who defended his PhD yesterday on 'Family matters: The role of trade-offs in shaping human life-histories and health' research.rug.nl/en/publicati... @rug.nl supervised with @erikpostma.bsky.social @lummaalab.bsky.social 🎉
November 18, 2025 at 8:58 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
hoehna.bsky.social
PhD position available in evolutionary genomics/bioinformatics (hoehnalab.github.io/job_adverts/...). Topic: analyzing gene expression evolution across several firefly species and linking expression changes to genomic architecture. The position is jointly supervised with @anaevolcatalan.bsky.social
hoehnalab.github.io
November 11, 2025 at 9:00 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
mtangili.bsky.social
Extremely proud of my good friend and colleague @euantheyoung.bsky.social whose work is featured in @nrc.nl. Read bellow for some excellent science and fascinating results. 👪🤰👶🧬
nrc.nl NRC @nrc.nl · 19d
Hoe meer kinderen een moeder krijgt, hoe minder lang ze zelf leeft. Tenminste, dat gold voor Finse moeders ten tijde van de Grote Finse Hongersnood. Deze en andere opmerkelijke feiten destilleerde Euan Young uit grote historische bevolkingsregisters.
buff.ly/Y1VNbQO
De risico’s en voordelen van oudere broers en zussen
Jong Geleerd: Hoe meer kinderen een moeder krijgt, hoe minder lang ze zelf leeft. Tenminste, dat gold voor Finse moeders ten tijde van de Grote Finse Hongersnood. Deze en andere opmerkelijke feiten…
buff.ly
November 10, 2025 at 11:09 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
euantheyoung.bsky.social
1/13 New paper out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Historical records across thousands of women showed that mothers with more children had shorter lifespans during a famine, fitting an evolutionary explanation for why we age
@hannahdugdale.bsky.social
@lummaalab.bsky.social
@erikpostma.bsky.social
November 10, 2025 at 10:57 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
hadley.nz
Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp....

genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.
GitHub - hadley/genzplyr: dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap
dplyr but make it bussin fr fr no cap. Contribute to hadley/genzplyr development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
November 6, 2025 at 11:25 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
henrikbengtsson.bsky.social
The detectCores() apocalypse is creeping up on us 👻🐛

As more people are getting access to 128+ CPU cores, code spinning up parallel cluster with detectCores() workers fails - not enough #RStats connections available

Friends, do *not* default to detectCores(), bc www.jottr.org/2022/12/05/a...
Please Avoid detectCores() in your R Packages
The detectCores() function of the parallel package is probably one of the most used functions when it comes to setting the number of parallel workers to use in R. In this blog post, I’ll try to explai...
www.jottr.org
November 5, 2025 at 11:55 PM
thijsjanzen.bsky.social
Potato-tomato
October 31, 2025 at 8:36 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
hannahdugdale.bsky.social
Congratulations to Dr @friggspeelman.bsky.social who was awarded a PhD yesterday 🎉 @rug.nl on 'Socially monogamous partnerships in birds: Causes, consequences, and pair-bond strength' research.rug.nl/en/publicati... A fantastic achievement!
October 15, 2025 at 12:21 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
jcwinternitz.bsky.social
Join Our Citizen Science Project!

We are mapping the house mouse hybrid zone in Schleswig-Holstein, DE, and you can help. Visit our House Mouse Hybrid Zone Project website to learn more jwinternitz.github.io/mouse-hybrid.... Funded by @dfg.de at @uni-hamburg.de

#DFG #musmusculus #wildmice
October 13, 2025 at 11:53 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
edwardteng.bsky.social
Muyuan Chen has turned structural biology into an immersive experience with his new video game Meowtabolism, now available on Steam.
Try the demo here: store.steampowered.com/app/4045010/...
Give Muyuan feedback: steamcommunity.com/app/4045010
#ScienceGaming #StructuralBiology #CryoEM #STEMOutreach
October 4, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
darshakbhatt.com
Very glad to share my first last-author paper, now published in iScience! 🎉In this study, we addressed a key challenge in virus-based cancer therapy: macrophage-mediated suppression, which limits viral infection and restricts T cell activation in tumors.
Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Alphavirus replicons encoding IFN-γ enhance cancer virotherapy by overcoming macrophage-mediated suppression
Interference by tumor-associated macrophages may significantly reduce the efficacy of therapeutic viruses designed to infect cancer cells and activate…
www.sciencedirect.com
September 12, 2025 at 1:24 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
thomasp85.com
I am beyond excited to announce that ggplot2 4.0.0 has just landed on CRAN.

It's not every day we have a new major #ggplot2 release but it is a fitting 18 year birthday present for the package.

Get an overview of the release in this blog post and be on the lookout for more in-depth posts #rstats
ggplot2 4.0.0
A new major version of ggplot2 has been released on CRAN. Find out what is new here.
www.tidyverse.org
September 11, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
charlottehuyghe.bsky.social
Even the cichlid fish eggs of Lake Tanganyika are highly diverse!

Picture by Grégoire Vernaz and Anja Haefeli

www.horizons-mag.ch/2025/09/04/f...
Fishing for biodiversity
Horizons - In brief
www.horizons-mag.ch
September 8, 2025 at 11:32 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
robertorozzi.bsky.social
🚨 Our study investigating the relationship between evolutionary age and range size across plants and animals is out in @natcomms.nature.com! Delighted to be part of this great project led by @adrianaalzate.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐📈⏳️🐐🐋🐦🦎🐸🐠🌴🏝
August 31, 2025 at 11:13 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
josephtobias.bsky.social
🚨New paper led by @adrianaalzate.bsky.social showing that in most plant and animal groups the age of a species predicts its geographical range size, although the relationship is strongly mediated by dispersal ability and occurrence on islands 🧪🌐🪶

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
August 28, 2025 at 12:56 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
maxshafer.bsky.social
Now published @natecoevo.nature.com with @annika-nichols.bsky.social, our latest on the evolution of 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 across 𝟲𝟬 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀 of cichlid fishes! doi.org/10.1038/s415...
with members of the @schierlab.bsky.social and Salzburger labs, as well as the burgeoning Shafer lab @uoftcellsysbiol.bsky.social
August 28, 2025 at 2:18 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
annbot.bsky.social
🔥ADVANCE ACCESS🔥: Climatic oscillations, dispersibility and adaptability behind worldwide mountain radiations of the Helichrysum– Anaphalis—Pseudognaphalium (HAP) clade (Compositae)
doi.org/10.1093/aob/...
August 4, 2025 at 6:16 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
idiv-research.bsky.social
To the paper: doi.org/10.1038/s414...
Evolutionary age correlates with range size across plants and animals - Nature Communications
Why are some species widespread while others are found only in small, isolated areas? This study shows that species with narrow ranges, and thus higher extinction risk, are often island-restricted, po...
doi.org
August 27, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
idiv-research.bsky.social
A new @natcomms.nature.com study led by iDiv alumna @adrianaalzate.bsky.social @naturalis.bsky.social uncovered that across >26,000 species evolutionary age is positively linked to range size, except in marine mammals.

#Biodiversity #Evolution #iDivResearch
www.idiv.de/older-specie...
Older species tend to have large ranges – unless they live on islands
New Nature Communication publications sheds light on how ecological, evolutionary, and geographical processes can simultaneously shape species’ vulnerability to extinction.
www.idiv.de
August 27, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
eawag.bsky.social
An international study conducted in Eawag's experimental ponds demonstrates how indirect ecological effects influence the evolution of species.

👉 www.eawag.ch/en/info/port...
Indirect effects drive evolution
An international study conducted in Eawag's experimental ponds demonstrates how indirect ecological effects influence the evolution of species.
www.eawag.ch
August 28, 2025 at 8:19 AM
thijsjanzen.bsky.social
This study by @hoehna.bsky.social and coauthors seems very reassuring: where we often pick partition specific models rather ad-hoc, it appears these do not influence divergence time estimations.
(I would still love to see a densitree plot though!)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Impact of Partition Models on Phylogenetic Inference and Divergence Times of Lampyridae from Mitochondrial Genomes
Mitochondrial genomes are frequently used for phylogenetic inference due to their availability and cost-efficient sequencing. In most mitogenomic phylogenetic analyses, only the two ribosomal RNA and ...
www.biorxiv.org
August 28, 2025 at 8:38 AM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
samillingworth.com
🌍 Age and extinction risk

Analysing 26,000 species, researchers found older plants and animals usually have larger ranges, while younger species, island dwellers, and poor dispersers face greater extinction risk.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#SciComm 🧪
Evolutionary age correlates with range size across plants and animals - Nature Communications
Why are some species widespread while others are found only in small, isolated areas? This study shows that species with narrow ranges, and thus higher extinction risk, are often island-restricted, po...
www.nature.com
August 25, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Thijs Janzen
acapomorphic.bsky.social
We now have protein sequences from rhino enamel that are >20 million years old! I am extremely excited and grateful to have been part of this project. The incredible thing: these sequences are informative enough to place this ancient species in the rhino tree! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Phylogenetically informative proteins from an Early Miocene rhinocerotid - Nature
Protein sequences from fossil tooth enamel of a rhinocerotid from Canada’s High Arctic are used to develop phylogenetic frameworks from a specimen too old to preserve ancient DNA.
www.nature.com
July 10, 2025 at 8:38 PM